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Dutch Healthcare Company Provides Secure Access to More Employees

ZorgSaam provides hospital care, ambulance service, home care, and elder care in the Zeeland-Flanders region of the Netherlands. The company’s staff of approximately 5,000—doctors, nurses, specialists, administrators, and others—access numerous corporate applications daily, from specialized medical applications to human resources software and Microsoft Office. Much of the data contained in these applications is highly sensitive and protected by privacy regulations.

Trigger: Virtual Application Hosting Created a Need for Increased ComplianceZorgSaam had been using RSA SecurID tokens and appliances to provide two-factor authentication for 400 employees accessing corporate applications from home. When the company migrated to Citrix XenApp for virtual application hosting, ZorgSaam needed a better, more cost-effective, secure access solution to protect patient data and compliance with ISO 27001 security and healthcare industry privacy regulations. Additionally, they needed to extend secure access for more employees, yet keep the login process as simple as possible.

Solution: McAfee One Time Password and YubikeysTurning to Network Solutions Nederland B.V. (NSNL) for recommendations, ZorgSaam investigated several vendors’ solutions. In the end, ZorgSaam selected McAfee One Time Password server. “The McAfee OTP [One Time Password] server stood above the rest,” says Johan Terlouw, ZorgSaam IT back office manager. “It was two to three times less expensive than its nearest competitor, plus it offered a more complete solution with more flexibility in types of two-factor authentication.”

ZorgSaam opted to choose Yubico YubiKey USB devices as the secondary means of authentication in addition to user names and passwords. YubiKey devices dynamically generate a one-time password that the user can use to gain access to their corporate applications.

Results: Secure Access for 5,000 Users at Same Cost as for 400The combined cost savings of McAfee One Time Password with the YubiKey solution compared to extending the pre-existing RSA SecurID solution to all employees is substantial. “For the same cost to provide secure access to 400 employees, ZorgSaam can now provide secure access to all 5,000 employees,” notes Terlouw.

Furthermore, the solution is much easier to deploy and manage, and since McAfee One Time Password is an interoperable solution that comes with full support for most remote access solutions, ZorgSaam was able to integrate it easily within their environment and YubiKey. “To set up secure access for 500 users takes maybe 15 minutes,” Terlouw explains. “The hardest part of deployment is the physical distribution of the YubiKeys to employees, but once they start using it, they find the process is very simple.” Even the most skeptical users have been adopting the solution and accessing corporate applications with ease.

“The McAfee OTP [One Time Password] server stood above the rest. It was two to three times less expensive than its nearest competitor, plus it offered a more complete solution with more flexibility in types of two-factor authentication.”

Johan Terlouw,IT BackOffice Manager, ZorgSaam

ZorgSaam also values the flexibility to be able to use other modes of authentication as well. McAfee Simple Message Services (SMS) is helpful in the rare instances when the user’s YubiKey is unavailable. Some employees also use the McAfee Pledge Software token to generate one-time passwords for secure access via mobile devices. “In every aspect—cost, time savings, ease of use, flexibility— we are very pleased we decided to go with McAfee One Time Password,” concludes Terlouw. “It works well now and sets us up well for the future.”